written by Twylene Moyer, managing editor of Sculpture
magazine, an art historian, lecturer, and writer who has published
numerous articles on contemporary art.

People
who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and
mystery of the

image.
No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They
are afraid. By
asking
"What does this mean?" they express a wish that everything be
understandable. But if
one
does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One
asks other things.

 Renι Magritte

Lynden Cline's sculptures inhabit an uncanny
realm of ambiguity. Masquerading behind a cloak of benign domesticity,
they take on the forms of everyday objects whose comfortable familiarity
lulls the unsuspecting into daydream tales of the ordinary. We think we
know this world. A little girl's Sunday school purse, charming toy-sized
chairs and beds, tree-forms that resemble flower arrangements, tables
that look as though they could adorn an entrance hall  for the
unwary, these icons instinctively wrap the mind in sheltering images of
intimacy, the idealized and nostalgic warmth of home and family. Cline's
dissembling objects so closely mirror life's surface veneer that we
scarcely notice the troubling details that creep out from the shadows,
the anachronisms and disjunctions that gnaw away at the illusion of
stability. We don't want to see them. We don't want to think that the
perfect image is an empty lie.

But the subtle aberrations persist, clutching
at the corners of the unconscious, slowly insinuating themselves into
our perception. When we finally and fully see them for what they are, it
is too late to withdraw back into objective normalcy. The very
touchstones of reality, the things we cling to for reassurance in a
brittle, uncertain world, have been spirited away, transformed into
bizarre doppelgangers that prey on our insecurities.

A forest of tiny beds rises from the ground,
stretching into sharply spiked towers over our heads, closing in with a
prison of impossibly elongated, stilt-like legs. We cannot climb into
them, cannot hide under them. Brambles infest the abandoned hall table,
spreading tangled confusion and decay. They thrive without visible
source or clear explanation  escaped, maybe released, from the
blackness of an empty box. The discarded, useless lid lies overturned
below, bored through with sinister holes. The same cut-outs (maybe we
first thought of them as decoration), pierce the girl's purse, which we
only now notice gapes open at the sides. What should be nothing more
than a housing for childhood's pretend treasures no longerconceals, no longer protects. If we imagined
the relics of angelic innocence safely stored inside, all sweetness and
sunlight, we were mistaken in our recollection. Whatever the purse
harbored has been unleashed, and, like the plagues set loose from
Pandora's box, the disquiet and fear bred of that unknown cannot be
forced back into the container: instead, they grow, infecting the mental
foundations that establish us in the world.

House and home form the locus of psychological
security and individual identity. More than a literal shelter, the house
is our first universe  a cradle of comfort and well-being, a maternal
refuge against encroaching nightmares. It instills in us a sense of
belonging, and, at the same time, that space, the objects and people in
it, constitutes our first glimpse of the self. We know who we are based
on these early interactions. As adults, we continue to invest the
material objects of this space with a special significance. Saturated
with memory and illuminated by time, these springboards for childish
fantasy still contain a wealth of feeling and experience. We rely on
them to anchor us. But what if the space of the house, remembered as a
kind of primordial dream space, doesn't really belong to us? What if we
don't belong to it? Rather than a wellspring of security, the domestic
sphere becomes a rootless source of anxiety.

Cline guts the implied promise of that dream
space, exposing its dark recesses and hidden crevices. Walls are laid
bare and reduced to cages, voids open in floors, lamps emit a harsh,
naked light, stairs lead into an abyss of nothingness, ladders and
doorways fail to offer passage. The cradle itself is no more than a
barred wasteland of rejection, its barren, desiccated soil incapable of
nurture. No matter which way we turn, our expectations are thwarted, our
need to find solid ground and clear rules frustrated. The terrain keeps
shifting, denying all sanctuary.

Objects, even art objects, are not supposed to
behave like this. They occupy a defined position in the world. But
Cline's sculptures break free of their logical moorings, expanding and
contracting before our eyes: now drawing us into their sphere, now
encroaching into our physical reality. More than what they appear to be,
they hold us in thrall to what lies behind them. The distinction between
inner imaginings and outer appearances has broken down. Exiled from the
adult parameters of ordinary appearances, with its fragile assurances
that the one-dimensional plane we typically inhabit is the sum total of
human experience, we have crossed back into childhood. Not the storybook
version we like to tell ourselves  a rose-colored narcotic  but a
fractured fairy tale populated with the gothic latencies of the
imagination. Strip away the illusion and we admit the shadow world,
staring face to face with a haunting doubt. Here, the mind once again
works its frightening magic on the inanimate world around us, and the
bottom drops out from beneath our carefully constructed artifices.

Remember and feel those eerie moments of
loneliness when all the comforts of home failed, when the unseen, the
unknown, broke through its barriers and took form: tree branches  we
know they are nothing more than shadows swaying in the wind  grope
their spectral fingers toward us in the dark; the pile of clothes thrown
on a chair gathers shape and mass; our hands searching for a crayon
under the radiator touch something warm and fleshy. Reliving these
moments, the cozy platitudes of our lives vanish, replaced by a numbing
absence that, try as we might to suppress it with routine and the daily
grind of interaction, lingers on to penetrate our carefully crafted
armor. We see that hollow shell now, a sarcophagus molded around the
flame of inner life. Confronted with its sculptural reality, we need to
consider which is the true prison: the intimations of the imagination,
freely roaming between the hard facts of the physical world and the
soft, pliable images we carry inside, or the defensive cages we choose
to build around ourselves, confining our experience to the mundane, too
weak to leave the drab dependability of appearances.

Reduced to the barest essentials of form,
Cline's tableaux and objects take a conceptual approach to image-making.
They may closely approximate their sources in the phenomenal world, but
their realism generates from within the viewer's mind. Each chair, bed,
window, or tree, every poetic of objects, is an artifact or imprint that
embodies an inner realization. Their power to affect, to probe deep into
the psyche, stems from their archetypal simplicity. Gray and blackened
steel and ebonized wood form a screen on which each individual projects
his or her own personal demons. The sculptures themselves become mutable
shadows, provoking and responding to a vertiginous stream of
associations. The images we conjure around and through them are an
essential part of our mental complexity, living organisms that carry on
within us, darkly, whether we acknowledge them or not.

For Cline herself, the sculptures serve a dual
purpose: they bring forth and exorcise a personal narrative of adoption,
encoding a past both real and desired, re-enacting and altering it,
coming to terms with its influence over her present. This much she tells
us. Of course, we want to know more. Our natural inclination, almost a
defense mechanism, is to uncover the meaning behind these silent and
disturbing enigmas, to dissect them with the blade of biography, paring
away until we have fully exposed, analyzed, and understood every
fragmentary detail from beginning to end. We need to understand them
because they frighten us: if we can locate an exact meaning in the
artist's life then we won't have to look too closely at ourselves. But
the specific drama of emotional upheaval and painful introspection that
lies behind the work belongs to the artist alone: her secrets remain
intact. In fact, after arranging the stage, Cline erases herself from
the finished works, leaving behind an impersonal, detached neutrality.
The important work  the delving into the self  lies only in the
making. Steel and wood betray no trace of her hand. The forms are
anonymous, giving only just enough information, waiting for us to
complete them however we will.

The story may begin with Cline, but its visual
embodiment plays out within each individual viewer. She provides an
allusive framework, a mysterious, creative space of metamorphoses
reinforced by her riddle-like titles, then allows us to roam freely
among her doll-house miniatures and looming, distorted furnishings. As
memory and imagination take hold, dragging us deeper and deeper into the
associative spiral, we slowly realize that this theater of the mind is
as much our creation as that of the artist.

Cline's work opens the inner space and reveals
its existence. It doesn't matter what the specific contents are; they
will be different for each of us. Her self-exploration becomes the
catalyst triggering our own explorations. Each of us threads a path
through this borderland between resonant image and the mind's
reverberations. Loss, fear, rejection, nostalgia  we inflect our
descriptions of Cline's works with ourselves, our own internalizations
of the unknown. It is difficult terrain. We don't mind the occasional
voyeuristic frisson of existential terror, as long as it remains safely
confined to the pages of book, locked in the frame of a painting or in
someone else's life. Yet with the fear comes wonder, a widening of
possibilities. What is the point of a life hobbled by limitation,
reigned in by the narrow strictures of safety and confined to the
certainties we believe that we know? Rainer Maria Rilke, who sensitively
and courageously celebrated the deep-seated uncertainties at our core,
argues in favor of intensity: "Works of art always spring from
those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience,
to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares
to go... the more personal, the more unique a life becomes." The
danger doesn't have to be dramatic or literal; it consists simply in
moving beyond the surface flow of life and objects, in having the
courage to look at what lies within and beneath. When we really live a
poetic image of the kind manifested in Cline's work, we become aware of
the secrets behind our being.